Existing service (that is, non-manufacturing domains, such as but not limited to information technology (IT) service delivery, call centers, health care delivery, loan and/or mortgage processing, etc.) dispatching systems use a dispatcher, most often, a human agent generally knowledgeable in the relevant service industry, to allocate service requests to different service agent queues.
Existing methods for dispatching requests to service agents have numerous drawbacks. For example, existing approaches include ad hoc methods for determining how complex an incoming service request is, and for matching that request with the most appropriate agent skills. Also, existing approaches are not designed to consider the overall state of the system. Further, existing dispatching control systems assume stationary variance. For example, the skills and skill level of an agent remain constant with time, which is not appropriate in a service environment due to factors such as agent training, group dynamics, different tools and technologies used by agents to diagnose and fulfill service requests at different times.
Additionally, existing approaches do not account for variability in the skill levels of the different queue servers or differences in the complexity of the calls that arrive to the center when distributing the calls.
As described herein, significant improvement in service levels can be achieved by, for example, incorporating additional factors such as, for example, service complexity, priority, agent-skill variability set, and non-stationary variance, that are missing in existing approaches. Existing techniques are drawn largely from the manufacturing environment, and thus reflect the more stationary and predictable manufacturing setting where factors such as varying skill sets, agent training, or group dynamics are not relevant.